Al Hoagland tinkers with the hard drive he helped develop 50 years ago at IBM. The 600 lb hard drive called the RAMAC contains 50 - 24 inch discs that spin up to 1200 rpm. RAMAC stands for Random Access Method of Accounting and Control.
Hoagland is one of the people who worked on the team that developed the first hard drive for IBM 50 years ago this month. He's got the RAMAC back and is gearing it up to work again at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Photo by Michael Maloney / San Francisco Chronicle on 9/5/06 in MOUNTAIN VIEW,CA
***Al Hoagland MANDATORY CREDIT FOR PHOTOG AND SF CHRONICLE/ -MAGS OUT less

Al Hoagland tinkers with the hard drive he helped develop 50 years ago at IBM. The 600 lb hard drive called the RAMAC contains 50 - 24 inch discs that spin up to 1200 rpm. RAMAC stands for Random Access Method ... more

Photo: Michael Maloney

Image 2 of 7

IBM's RAMAC weighed more than a ton. Photo, 1957 courtesy of IBM Archives

IBM's RAMAC weighed more than a ton. Photo, 1957 courtesy of IBM Archives

Image 3 of 7

Hitachi, LTD.'s new 8GB Mikey drive is shown with dominoes to demonstrate its smaller profile. Mikey is a new miniature hard drive from Hitachi that can store several thousand songs or pictures in 8 GB of storage. (AP Photo/HO/Hitachi Inc. Ran on: 01-06-2005
Bill Gates displays Microsoft's iRiver H-10 digital music device. less

Hitachi, LTD.'s new 8GB Mikey drive is shown with dominoes to demonstrate its smaller profile. Mikey is a new miniature hard drive from Hitachi that can store several thousand songs or pictures in 8 GB of ... more

Photo: AP

Image 4 of 7

SUPERCOMPUTER183_fl.jpg Deep inside Lawrence Livermore National Lab is Blue Gene, an IBM system that is the world's reigning supercomputer. Mark Seager stands by thousands of hard drives installed into the super computer at the Lawrence Livermore National Lab.8/19/05 Livermore CA Frederic Larson The San Francisco Chronicle Ran on: 08-29-2005
Mark Seager shows off BlueGene-L, the world's most powerful supercomputer, deep inside Lawrence Livermore National Lab. less

SUPERCOMPUTER183_fl.jpg Deep inside Lawrence Livermore National Lab is Blue Gene, an IBM system that is the world's reigning supercomputer. Mark Seager stands by thousands of hard drives installed into the ... more

Hard-driving valley began 50 years ago / And most other forms of data storage eventually became a distant memory

1 / 7

Back to Gallery

The silicon chip gets all the attention. The valley is even named after it. But none of the computer revolution would have been possible without the humble hard drive, which IBM introduced to the world 50 years ago this week.

"It gets second shrift," said Al Hoagland, 79, who worked on the team of IBM engineers who built the magnetic disk drives back when Silicon Valley was still mostly orchards. "The disk drive is more important in revolutionizing society than most people are willing to say. With everything shifting to an Internet-centered world and replacing papers, all the records and anything we care about are stored on magnetic disks."

Doing These 5 Uncomfortable Things Will Only Pay Off LaterMedia: Buzz 60

Wyclef Jean's Next Act: Tech and CannabisMedia: Cheddar TV

Smart Cam Maker Arlo Soars in Market DebutMedia: Cheddar TV

Sonos Goes Public, But at Reduced ValueMedia: Cheddar TV

According to Bill Healy, senior vice president of corporate strategy and marketing at Hitachi, which bought IBM's hard drive unit in 2003, "If you make a call on a phone, do an Internet search or use a credit card, you are interacting with a storage device."

"Really, 'Storage Valley' would be a more appropriate name," Healy said, perhaps getting a little carried away. "The semiconductor guys just had better marketing and public relations."

People in the industry love to talk about the way the hard drive has kept pace with, and even drove, Silicon Valley's smaller-cheaper-faster mantra.

The amount of information stored on the modern hard drive is 100 million times greater than it was 50 years ago, and the $30 billion industry is headed into a boom where users put ever more data -- photos, songs, videos -- onto ever-smaller devices.

Dave Wickersham, chief operating officer for Seagate Technology, the world's largest maker of disk drives, with headquarters in Scotts Valley (Santa Cruz County), compared the advancement in disk drives with that in automobiles. A car in 1956 cost about $2,500, could hold five people, weighed a ton, and could go as fast as 100 mph. If the auto industry had kept the same pace as disk drives, a car today would cost less than $25, hold 160,000 people, weigh half a pound and travel up to 940 mph.

It all started with an invention from IBM's research lab in San Jose, which the public caught its first glimpse of on Sept. 13, 1956, when Big Blue unveiled its 305 RAMAC machine. It marked the first time a computer had magnetic disk storage.

The historic date will be marked Tuesday at an invitation-only celebration at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, and with events Wednesday and Thursday at DiskCon USA, the conference of the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (online at www.idema.org) at the Hyatt Regency Hotel and Santa Clara Convention Center.

Before IBM's breakthrough, computers relied on paper or magnetic tapes. The process was slow and cumbersome, as the machines had to read the paper or tape sequentially, instead of getting instant access to the information.

It's not as though the breakthrough made things any smaller. According to Hitachi's Healy, the RAMAC weighed a ton, was the size of a double refrigerator, and relied on 50 spinning platters. It cost $50,000, and held 5 MB of information -- roughly the equivalent of one song on a modern iPod. (A 60-GB iPod holds about 15,000 songs.)

The credit for the breakthrough generally goes to Reynold Johnson, who died in 1998 at age 92. Johnson, who earlier had invented the device used to grade multiple choice tests still in use today, was hired by IBM to establish a lab on the West Coast, which he did in 1952, when he opened a small office at 99 Notre Dame Ave. in San Jose.

"He had no idea of what he was going to do," said Hoagland, who left UC Berkeley to join Johnson's team. "The company had no idea. They didn't expect much out of him anyway."

Hoagland fell into his historic role as well. "I claim this, but I can't prove it: I drew the short straw," he said. As a grad student at Berkeley, most of the engineers wanted to work on logic design, and Hoagland wound up working on the memory.

He soon was doubling as a consultant to IBM, and in 1956, he joined Johnson's team full time.

"Rey was the kind of guy who, if you had a good idea, he would encourage you," Hoagland said. "He was one of these inventive creative visionary types who if he believed something, he didn't abandon it."

Johnson was awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1986 by President Ronald Reagan. Hoagland is now working to preserve the legacy by trying to get the boxy little white building at 99 Notre Dame Ave. turned into a museum.

The building, which has been declared a city landmark, is used by Santa Clara County Superior Court for child support cases, and Hoagland says it's likely to be vacated. "They have three full-time security guards for a couple of little courtrooms," he said.

He would rather see it turn into the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center. For the time being, he's working on getting the original RAMAC back into working order at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View.

"It's the biggest thing ever to occur in San Jose," Hoagland said proudly. "It preceded the semiconductor being out here."